Identification of a Woman review – Michelangelo Antonioni’s midlife crisis of a movie

Tomas Milian and Daniela Silverio in Identification of a Woman. Photograph: Cult Films

Michelangelo Antonioni’s long slide from critical favour may or may not be reversed by the re-release of this late work from 1982, a midlife or latelife crisis of a movie that Antonioni made at the age of 70 and was his last serious solo directorial work. (I would much prefer to see a revival of his tremendous and neglected film The Lady Without Camelias from 1953.)

Anyway, this revives his signature themes – metaphysical mystery, existential anxiety, sexual obsession – and there are some definite, pleasing flourishes. But unfortunately, as with the later movies of Fellini, there are some softcore sex scenes and a preposterously romanticised and eroticised search for the ideal (and sexually available) woman; the concept of the sexually restless middle-aged film-maker auditioning young women to be in his movies jars a little.